Goose Feathers to the Rescue
by BlytheHasFreckles
Summary: When Phineas invites Isabella to go baby shopping for Candace, he expects it to be like any other usual shopping experience: nothing extravagant. However, their experience turns out to be a lot different than they expected when an emergency situation causes him to see a new side of her - a side responsible for saving someone's life. Part of "(Please) Don't Read This Journal."


**Why hello there, fellow Phineas and Ferb fiends! Remember me? It's been too long, hasn't it?**

**So basically, the following one-shot is what happens while Phineas, Isabella, and Linda go baby shopping for Candace for the first time. It goes after chapter 14 of my story, "(Please) Don't Read This Journal" so if you haven't read that yet, I'd recommend you try it just so that you'll know generally what's going on and what happened before they went baby shopping. If not, that's fine also! You'll catch on fine. :)**

**For the record, I've been nursing this story for like, a month, so I'm SO sorry it's taken me so long to release! I've been incredibly busy recently! Even so, I do plan on updating (P)DRTJ within the following week or so. I'm limited on time, but I'll certainly try. :)**

****Reviews are super appreciated, but please be civil!**

**Enjoy, you guys!**

**-Blythe**

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****I don't own Phineas and Ferb because I'm lame**

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"Oh Candace, would you look at this?! _Ear muffs!_ For_ babies!_ And look! Aw, look at this _bib_! It has little embroidered baby roses around the edges!"

The Flynn's had officially lost Linda amid the aisles of strollers, high-chairs, and car seats. Of course, they'd known the minute they rolled into the parking lot of Babies R Us that the mother's disposition would be that of overwhelming nostalgia when assisting her daughter with shopping for her unborn grandchild; Linda had even been collecting coupons for this very day. (And she let everyone else know plenty of times on the way there.)

"I'm just so excited, aren't you, Candace?"

"Overjoyed," replied Candace flatly, half-heartedly sifting through a pile of folded cotton shirts. She searched tiredly behind her mother for baby attire, fingering the edges of countless onesies before allowing herself to smile over any of them.

When she was several years younger, the baby shopping excursion was an experience she thought would be much more enthralling. But as a twenty year-old, the circumstances for why she was shopping didn't leave much room for her to enjoy; Jeremy still didn't know and she had been purposely keeping him in the dark even weeks after she found out she was expecting. On top of that, she worried about the distance she was keeping him at. Surely he must be wondering the reason behind being given the cold shoulder by his own girlfriend! How long was she planning on hiding before she finally came clean?

It hadn't even been ten minutes into shopping and Candace's head was already swimming with questions and worst-case scenarios, much like the way her mind has always worked. _Just tell him!_ Stacy had said on the phone to her earlier, _You'll never be able to predict what he'll say unless you tell him!_ But it was easy for _her_ to say! _She_ wasn't in the same situation. However, Stacy _did_ have a point...

Wheeling the cart down the winter attire aisle, the troubled mother-to-be could already feel the rows get shorter and shorter. She kept her eyes on the tiled flooring and tried swallowing the lump that had formed at the base of her throat as she thought of Jeremy again in a far more troublesome way than before this whole predicament arose. Quietly, she watched her mother pick up matching baby pajamas and drape them over her arm, uttering something Candace couldn't hear while in a quiet panic. She noticed an ache forming in the center of her chest as she began to notice that the air in the room had suddenly become stuffy and harder to breathe.

* * *

Isabella enjoyed any chance she got to spend with the Flynns, and though her invitation to come baby shopping with them was prompt and unexpected, today was no exception. It gave her a chance to talk with her favorite person: a certain red-headed inventor who'd become distant since the beginning of the school year. The two fifteen year-olds walked alongside each other down the baby food aisle, chatting about their future plans, about high school, and joking every now and then about the clumsy events that had taken place within the past month. A lot remained unsaid, of course, but Isabella couldn't have asked for a better chance to hang out with Phineas and his family. After all, what could've been better than spending an evening with the boy she liked?

Phineas - on the other hand - found himself to be in a strange sort of limbo as he kept a steady pace next to his childhood friend. There was something about Isabella that made him feel self-conscious, though he couldn't quite differentiate it from the other tangled feelings he felt during adolescence. He enjoyed being with her and hearing her voice, and especially reveled in the moments he was able to make her laugh... but he began to notice that he was having a harder and harder time looking her directly in the eye. There was something different about her, giving him a queasy feeling as if something had been swiped from beneath him while he wasn't looking, or perhaps a relative feeling to spacing out and realizing he was in a place far from where he'd just been.

For now, he blamed it on recent incidences- Isabella's horrifying initiation onto the cheering squad, the dinner party that ended in disaster, his broken nose and slight concussion (all caused by a kitchen appliance, of all things)... and to top it off, removing chewing gum from Isabella's hair earlier that day. The two of them were victims of circumstance - perhaps even in a comical way. However, it wasn't these things that made him feel different about Isabella as he walked beside her, so he figured it must've been nerves. It had to be.

...But then the remaining question was; why was he even nervous in the first place?

"So um... Lit class the other day. Interesting, right?" started Phineas weakly, scratching the back of his ear.

Isabella rolled her eyes in remembrance of the previous week's classes, namely of the amount of time it took for her to separate the covers of her english textbook after someone had glued the pages together. "yeah. Interesting."

"Miss Rosenstone is a really engaging speaker!" commented Phineas, gradually regaining his usual enthusiasm, "for some reason, I remember english class the most above all my other classes when I get home."

The taste in Isabella's mouth was bitter when she thought of the young intern: her libidinous outfits, her flirtatious demeanor, the fact that she spends entirely too many classes sitting on Phineas's desk and asking him questions that are irrelevant to the topics being discussed, "mhm. "

"What a nice woman. She even offers me lunch sometimes!" pondered Phineas thoughtfully.

Isabella stopped mid-aisle, already feeling phlegm rising in her throat at the very idea of him enjoying his daily cheese sandwiches with a woman other than herself.

"She does?"

"Yeah, but I never join her since I have Chemistry work to review over lunch usually. It's a shame I never have enough time to. Makes me feel guilty sometimes. It sometimes even seems like she-" He suddenly noticed that his neighbor from across the street had disappeared from the conversation, "Isabella?"

She appeared to be gazing off into space, "Hm?"

"Is something wrong?"

She smiled softly at the concern in his voice, but wasn't quite sure how she would articulate how talking about the infamous Miss Rosenstone made her stomach churn, "Nothing. I'm fine."

"Are you sure? You looked a little upset just now."'

"Yeah, I'm uh...I was just thinking," she stared at their feet, counting the skid marks on the floor. The ground seemed so much further away now than it did as a ten year old. "About the old days - when we were kids. Y'know, with all the others. Do you ever think about them?"

He nodded, "All the time."

The two of them drifted without any idea where they were going in the store, meandering in and out of each row like wandering guppies in a fish tank. They strode through the bedroom aisle, passing several shelves of goose feather pillows and commented every so often about school, reflecting on the past and how much busier they were during last summer while they prepared for high school, and even briefly brought up what a shame it was that the group they'd both gotten to know so dearly had drifted apart from them. Buford was quarterback of the football team, Baljeet had recently made the basketball team, a few fireside girls were cheerleaders while the other few had also become estranged, Ginger was the editor of the school newspaper... and, of course, Ferb seemed to be even more disconnected as usual and kept an even further distance from the rest. The shocking part of that was that he even kept his inner thoughts from Phineas. Tonight, he'd stayed home with Lawrence - another unusual instance. Phineas and Ferb never went anywhere without each other.

"Gosh, Isabella. It seems like the two of us are all that's left these days, y'know?"

She nodded, "It really does feel like that."

"I mean, maybe it's one of those petty things that we're supposed to leave in the past so we can move forward with our lives, but... it's just sad that people we knew so well are now just faces in the hallway."

"I know what you mean, Phineas," the two of them rounded another corner, turning in to the kitchenware section, "To tell you the truth, I was afraid that would happen to us."

The Flynn's eyebrows knit together at her comment, "Really?"

"Yes. Since freshman year started, it began to feel like we'd somehow become strangers. We'd barely get time to talk and usually we would only have time between classes to speak to one another." A thought came upon her and she laughed, looking to the ground in embarrassment, "Until a few weeks back, I began to think you were avoiding me."

He gulped, "Avoiding you? Why ever would I be avoiding-"

Not paying attention to where he's going, Phineas's elbow grazed a hanging display of pacifiers, knocking several of them to the ground. Once again it seemed that his clumsy adolescence had sported itself at a moment when he really could've done without it. His face flushed a soft pink as the two began to pick them up.

"Not again," he mumbled, "I can do it, Isabella. Really."

"No, don't be silly. I don't mind. It happens to the best of us!"

As soon as she'd gathered enough of them in her arms, she began placing the merchandise back on it's original hanger, keeping an eye on her beloved as he picked up the rest. Arms full, he rose to his feet and followed suit with putting the packaged items back on their hooks, making sure not to drop what he'd already knocked to the floor.

As soon as Isabella's hands were empty, she gazed back at her childhood friend, "Hey Phineas?"

"Yes?"

"I'm...I'm glad we've still stayed the same. It's nice to still know at least one person who can remember the old days. It's less lonely." she commented bashfully.

"Yes. Yes it is."

The silence that had snuck its way back into the conversation reminded Isabella of their conversation earlier that day - about how they'd discovered that both of them visited the same place in the morning to watch the sun come up without knowing it. All those times visiting Danville park and Phineas was there at the same time all along, just at a different spot. She wouldn't have to sit alone under the willow tree thinking about Phineas if he was there with her, right? And now was the perfect opportunity Isabella had been waiting for! _Now is my chance,_ she thought,_ ask him! Ask him now!_

"Oh! Um, Phineas?"

"Uh huh?"

"There was something I've been meaning to ask... and, well, I was just wondering... if sometime you'd like to-"

Suddenly, Isabella was interrupted by loud, ear-splitting CRASH followed by a distressful call, "Help! Somebody help!"

The red-headed inventor turned to seek out the direction in which the frantic alarm was originating, "Where is it coming from?!"

"I don't- Oh! Over there! The ceiling!"

Much to their horror, they found the source of the panic; a man - most likely a maintenance employee - was hanging from the rafters in the ceiling, flailing his legs and yelling for help. Employees in similar attire rushed into the aisle, causing an even greater uproar as confusion spread over a gathering crowd of shoppers. Phineas and Isabella pushed through the crowd just enough to see what had happened to put the man in peril.

Across the tiling lay what used to be a scaffolding ladder, one built for such high ceilings as a warehouse and scattered bits of metal covered the floor, presumably what had been bolts and screws, but had snapped under some kind of pressure. Phineas immediately broke through the crowd and examined the bits, determining what had happened to the collapsed ladder.

"Judging by the amount of wear on the spreader screws, it had been overused, eventually leading the extending legs to rely solely on the already unstable hinges. Then, the aluminum screws broke while this maintenance employee used the ladder to change a lightbulb in the ceiling, causing the whole thing to practically fold into itself and the hinges to shatter to the ground, leaving him to hang onto the rafters twenty-five feet in the air."

His entire description went right over Isabella's head, but she took one of the pieces of metal from the floor and rolled it around in her palm, "So what do we do?"

"I have to get in there and try to fix the ladder!" he said, and then the two dove even further into the commotion until they were almost directly beneath the man hanging from the ceiling. A few maintenance workers were seen scurrying about, lifting part of the latter to try and put it back together. One of them met the two adolescents with a warning.

"Kid, you and your girlfriend need to step back."

"But sir, I know how to put this ladder back together! I build ladders and machines all the time and I can fix it almost instantly! All you need is a replacement ladder spreader, a .1120in diameter hexagon lag screw, a hex nut washer, an adjustable-"

The maintenance worker put his hand up to silence him, "look kid, we don't have time to play woodshop. A man's life is at stake here."

"I know, but if you just let me put it back together you can-!"

"Are you going to cause trouble for me?"

Isabella joined in, "Sir, you don't understand! He really can fix this within seconds if you'd just give him a chance!"

"Look, little lady, I don't wanna have to call somebody because you two are interfering with adult work. Now scram or-"

"My hands are slipping!" plead the man hanging from the rafters, "I can't hold on any longer!"

This caused an even greater uproar as the crowd began to shift. Phineas looked at Isabella helplessly, "They won't let me put it back together. And I would make another ladder, but I don't have any tools!"

Isabella rested a consoling hand on his shoulder, "Then it looks like we'll just have to find another way."

She looked around for a solution, glancing down an aisle they'd just been down together. That's when an idea struck her - she didn't know why she hadn't thought of it before!

"I have an idea! Follow me!"

The two of them disappeared down aisle three and ran until Isabella came to a complete halt in front of several shelves of goose feather pillows. She looked at Phineas and shrugged her eyebrows, "Are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

* * *

When the two came back into the aisle, they arrived with shopping carts stocked full of the fluffy merchandise, rounding sharp corners with metallic squeaks as they maneuvered around the fallen ladder. Phineas turned the ladder on its side and pushed it out of the way as best he could, contrary to the direction of the other employees.

"Hey! HEY! I told you not to interfere with-"

"Everyone!" addressed Isabella to the growing audience of disquieted shoppers, "Please, help us empty these carts onto the ground! Hurry!"

And like a backdraft of flames, everyone pitched in and tipped over the carts, organizing the goose feather pillows in circular arrangement beneath the distressed maintenance worker as the two childhood friends retreated back to the same section and piled more pillows into the carts. From there, they alighted back in greater rush, hauling pillows by the pound. The crowd met them as the turned the corner, already overlapping the first layer of pillows with another layer.

"Isabella, are you sure this is going to work?"

"If we do it right, yes," she replied mid-stride, quickly running out of breath as she stopped, "all we need to find now is a blanket with strong fabric!"

Phineas pulled an encased throw blanket out from his cart, tugging at the packaging, "Way ahead of ya. Now if I could only find the way to open it... there's some kind of zipper hidden here somewhere... Looks like it's hidden and-"

"Or, you could hit it with a rock."

Then she remembered - there are no rocks. Especially not in a store for baby supplies.

"Oh. Right. No rocks."

"How about I use my teeth?"

Isabella nodded hastily, "Uh, yeah! Yeah, do that."

In one swift motion of his teeth, the plastic ripped apart and he shook out the blanket, straightening out the creases until it was one long, spread out sheet. Employees packed the space around him and took hold of the edges.

"Alright, everyone! Pull the corners and sides until the blanket is stretched as far as it goes!" instructed Isabella, "and make sure the pillows are underneath!"

The workers obeyed, spreading the sheet as far as they could until the blanket looked more like an outstretched banner than a household blanket. They shifted until they were fully hovering over the two foot high stack of goose feather pillows. The man spoke from twenty-five feet above.

"I have to let go! I'm slipping!" yelled the man, dangling for the remainder of whatever time he had left.

Isabella quickly took a part of the blanket next to Phineas and pulled tight, redirecting her gaze back up toward the ceiling. They were right where they needed to be.

"It's okay. You can let go." replied Isabella as calmly as she could manage, "you'll be okay. We'll catch you."

The man hestitantly released his grip and dropped from the ceiling, landing in the center of the blanket as if indefinitely falling into a safety net. His fall was cushioned by the pillows beneath the blanket, goosefeathers exploding from under the fabric and into the faces of everyone surrounding the pile, including Phineas and Isabella. The man lay in the enormous accumulation of cushions until he had enough bearings to catch his breath, a cheer erupting from the gathering of spectators. Amid the calamitous applause, the employee who had scolded the two before approached them for a third time; however, this time was in a manner of appreciation.

"I owe you two an apology," he began, "If you two didn't do all this, there's a good chance he wouldn't have come out of this alive. Or uninjured, at least."

Isabella modestly gave a shrug, looking to Phineas and back at the man, "It's no trouble. We did what we could for the amount of time that we had."

"Well, thank you." the man dusted off his own arm, which was covered in goose feather fragments, "and it looks like you two might wanna run a lint roller over your clothes when you get home!"

The man turned and headed back toward his co-workers as the Flynn gazed down at his friend, who was trying to shoo a goosefeather from atop her nose. She gazed back incredulously.

"What? Is it on my face?" she asked, searching her face for more pillow residue.

"Yeah. Heh."

The two stared at each other with an absence of words up until a chuckle emerged from Phineas's lips. He looked away from her for a moment, then look back, only for the chuckle to grow into laughter. Soon, his eyebrows shot up in sync with the edges of his lips as laughter evolved into downright hysterics. By the amount of feathers nestled into her hair, she reminded him of a South American cockatoo. ...Except Isabella harnessed more feathers in her hair than a cockatoo had on its entire body!

Isabella became increasingly confused the more dynamic the color of her crush's face changed from its usual olive tone to red.

"Phineas Flynn! What is so funny?!" she demanded, crossing her arms.

"You-! Your! Your hair and-! The feathers!"

"What about th-" Isabella's attention was withdrawn from his strange behavior as soon as she felt the texture of her hair. Oh yes, there were feathers alright - and they were everywhere! She began to join him in his hysterics, soon realizing that he was also practically camouflaged in goose feathers himself, caused her stomach muscles to ache from the hilarity.

"Your hair-! Isn't even-! Red anymore!" she barely managed, holding her ribs as they vibrated and began to cramp.

"Well I can't even SEE _your_ hair!" he countered. He grasped a shelf in the aisle to keep from tipping over. Neither of them could breathe or look at one another in fear of collapsing from the amusement; they even had to wait for several minutes for the laughter to die down long enough for them to breathe! This had no longer become another unfortunate circumstance that left them feeling embarrassed, but rather little mishap that ignited something that they hadn't experienced in a while; _silliness_.

As soon as he was able to recover, Phineas assisted Isabella with removing the veil of feathers from her hair. Isabella returned the favor as soon as she was able to recover.

"My, my, Miss Garcia-Shapiro! This is the _third_ substance I've had to remove from your hair this week!" teased the feather-clad inventor, "First the egg remains, then the bubblegum this afternoon, now feathers!"

Isabella pretended to be offended, "You know, I _could_ just leave all these feathers in your hair and let you walk around with your head looking like a bird's nest. It might not be all that bad - at least you wouldn't have to put on that heavy metal suit to look like The Beak!"

"Nah, white's not really my color," he replied. The two shared a warm laugh.

And then the two were revisited by silence when they realized they'd run out of feathers to pluck off of one another.

"Uh...Isabella?"

"Yes?"

"Remember how you said you go to Danville park in the morning when no one else is awake?"

Her heart could've jumped out of her chest and she wouldn't have noticed.

"Uh huh. Why?"

"Well, I... I was just thinking... do you think you'd like to join me sometime? Y'know, go to Danville park in the early morning to enjoy the sunrise...with me?"

"YES."

"Wha-"

"Uh, I mean... I'd love to. Yes, Phineas, that sounds very nice." recovered Isabella, putting on a guise of nonchalance, despite the fact she was bubbling over inside. After all that time spent worrying herself sick over asking him, she no longer carried that burden; she no longer had to follow a timeframe of what part of tonight would be the opportune moment to ask. It was silly - of course - but since it was all over, it was one less thing to be anxious about.

What she worried about now was the look he was giving her. They were closer than they were before - the usual 1 ½ foot distance between them was reduced to merely half of a foot (she was doing the math in her head). Something was happening - something big, given the intensity of his gaze. He seemed to be searching for something, almost as if cracking a code by memory or trying hard to multiply three-digit numbers in his head. It was perplexity she was seeing - a look that never clouded Phineas's usual sunny state of mind.

As he picked one last feather out of her hair, he allowed one of his knuckles to softly graze her cheek.

Meanwhile, Phineas's thoughts were a traffic jam of bewilderment. Truthfully, he wasn't gazing at his childhood friend because of romantic inclination, but rather because he had never felt more confused about anything in his life. He pulled his hand away from her face, fearing the sensation it was giving him.

He watched her for a second more and remembered what'd just taken place within the past twenty minutes - assuming he wasn't just imagining it, they'd saved a man's life...and it was all thanks to her. That leadership, that quick thinking, and especially that calmness she displayed right before the man let go of the rafters made Phineas's pulse escalate at the mere memory of it all. It was like old times when he built enormous contraptions in the backyard - Isabella was always there to carry out his plans. But this time, he'd carried out one of _her_ plans, and it felt somehow different than all those years in the past.

"And u-uh, Isabella. There was something else I wanted to say..."

"What is it?" she asked, worried about the change in his expression.

He rubbed the back of his neck nervously, "I just wanted to say...wow."

"Wow?"

"Yeah, wow. 'Wow' as in...I'm impressed. I mean, I always knew you were creative, but I never knew you were so good at handling situations like that! I mean, I knew and all...but you're always surprising me."

A warm blush spread over her cheeks, "It's a fireside girl thing, I guess. Remember when you fell fifty feet from that haunted house you built to get rid of my hiccups?"

Phineas laughed, recounting the memory, "Oh, yeah! How could I forget?"

"Well, it was kind of like that except without the other fireside girls and without sashes to use. And also, this time wasn't as terrifying."

"Yeah, that was pretty... terrifying."

She shivered at the bitter memory, "No kidding! That was the scariest thing I'd ever experienced! But I guess it prepared me for this, y'know?"

"Uh huh. I guess it did..."

Somehow, he could feel the vibrations of his heart get louder, even when he looked away from his childhood friend. What on Earth was wrong with him?

"Oh, there you two are!" came an exasperated voice - one coming from a person who'd been running. It was Linda. "I'm afraid we have to cut the trip short and head home now."

"What's wrong?" the two asked in unison.

"Something's wrong with Candace."

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**Thanks for reading, you guys! For those of you who haven't read it, check out my story "(Please) Don't Read This Journal" and keep your eyes open for chapter 15 to find out what happens next in the plot! If that doesn't strike your fancy, don't worry about it. :) Thanks for reading this one-shot anyway! I hope you liked it!**

**For those of you already reading and following (P)DRTJ, thank you for your patience! I hope to update really soon!**

**Until next time, ciao~!**

**-Blythe**


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